Chapter 5: The City in the City

Big city

Overgrown with weeds

But flowering weeds

On every corner a wrecking crew

And something new and crooked growing up cattycornered to that

— Tony Kushner

Two of the smaller black cats stopped to watch a man painting. It was dark, but he’d set up floodlights. No one bothered him. He was loosely filling in a grid on a two-story stucco wall. The cats stared a while before moving on.

The building was called WHLHSE and was home to an architecture firm that held on through the twenties by designing two things: playclaves for corporations whose employees chose to live on-prem, where they were safe, where water was clean, and where they could more or less express their rich identities (color, faith, gender, partner choice) without hindrance inside the corporate walls — at least as long as they did good work. And, with the income from the playclaves, housing for the very poor, homeless housing, which took the form of tiny gypsy wagons, miniature chapels, tents that reflected searchlights in mirrored swirls that reproduced the landscape behind the domicile, rendering them virtually invisible. And then again, beautiful, quirky, often functionless follies for the very rich.

Now, the slender man in black jeans was up on a ladder, blocking out a design of a city, a fabulous city as if imagined by Bellini and Ungerer, cubed-out, tree-grown, and densely populated with citizens who seemed to turn from angel to monster to machine as you looked at them, yet all of whose metamorphoses were dwarfed by the audacity of the structures.

It was well past midnight when the man in black jeans finished. He packed his equipment neatly and stowed it in the back of his van before driving away.

The next day, Gospel was taking UberHandle downtown to a gig teaching aerobics. Her head turned on a swivel as she passed WHLHSE.

“Slow down,” she hollered. “Can you loop back around?”

 Her biker let the machine coast, hit the back break a bit, and turned in a long lazy circle, letting his foot down front of the outline, which in daylight shone clearly as white chalk on slate-gray brick.

“Far out,” he murmured.

“Yeah,” agreed Gospel. She pulled her phone out of her backpack and took a few pictures. “Look, he’s working on it.” She hopped down from the handlebar and walked closer. A thin, tallish man wearing black jeans and a white t-shirt, his hair shorn close to his head, was standing on a ladder. He consulted a notebook and added more white lines to the gray. A tree grew slim and leafless for a dozen stories, wound its way into a window, put down a root, and became a potted plant. From one branch it grew a mirror, reflecting —

“Aw, no, I gotta be at work!” Gospel exclaimed under her breath. She didn’t want to interrupt the artist.

“I can come this way tomorrow,” hustled the biker. “Every day, if you like. Cut rate for a view like this.”

“Yeah,” said Gospel, hopping back up on the handlebars. “Yeah … ”